Bernstein: Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Is ‘Far Worse than Watergate’ — ‘He Tried to Stage a Coup’
(Via Breitbart)
BEHAR: “Yes. So, we’re just going to jump in because we have so little time and so much to talk about. As somebody who broke Watergate and knows a thing or two about presidential scandals, do you think what we are seeing with Trump today, the investigations and calls for indictment surrounding him, are worse than Nixon? Can comparisons even be made to Watergate? What do you say?”
BERNSTEIN: “No, this is far worse than Watergate. Let’s look at a couple of aspects of it. First of all, Richard Nixon was a criminal president of the United States who undermined the electoral system in this country just as Donald Trump has sought to undermine the electoral system in this country, but Trump has sought to do it in a much worse way. He tried to stage a coup so he would not leave office. He has told this big lie about what happened in the election. But more than that, we also have a situation in which we have in Trump the first seditious president of the United States. He has sought, you know, to bring about an insurrection to keep him in office. Whatever you say about Richard Nixon and his criminality, he left office peaceably. He allowed the peaceful transfer of power, which Trump hasn’t when he staged his coup. But more than that, we have the fact that courageous Republicans forced Richard Nixon to resign. They voted for articles of impeachment. He would’ve been convicted in the Senate because Republicans were willing to convict him for his crimes. Compare that to Donald Trump, his crimes, his constitutional crimes, and what the Republicans in the Senate have done. They have acquitted him twice. And we now have instead of a Republican Party committed to the rule of law and constitutional order, it has fallen to a kind of obeisance to Trumpism and its excesses.”
NAVARRO: “Carl, between Trump spewing lies about the election being rigged and stolen, as you just alluded to, and what we saw happen on January 6, our way of life has never been more at risk. We heard Joe Biden warn a dagger was held at the throat of America and American democracy. Do you think this is something that just happened as a result of Trump, or is there something more going on underneath?”
BERNSTEIN: “No. By no means did Donald Trump start this. We have been, and you’ve heard me say this, Ana, on the air with you before, we have been in a cold Civil War in this country for perhaps three decades. You all were just talking about the Supreme Court nomination and how it was fought. We can go back to the nomination by President Reagan of Robert Bork and the debate in the Senate, the absolutely harsh, terrible debate about confirming Robert Bork, totally partisan. It could have been a sensible debate. It was not. There was just viciousness in that debate that has lingered. Not saying the Bork nomination was necessarily the beginning, but it reached a point of boiling that we hadn’t seen before. And now that kind of boiling has been by Trump, ignited the cold Civil War that we have been witnessing in this country getting hotter and hotter. Trump ignited it. When we now live with the fire burning from Trump’s ignition, we saw it on January 6, we saw it in Charlottesville. Again, never had a president who has done this sort of ignition of all the forces in this country that are fighting each other. You have to go back to the Civil War and then you had a seditious president, Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy. He was a member of Congress, but he was not the president of the United States.”
LING: “We were just having this conversation about social media. So, add to all of this social media algorithms that just push us further apart. Mr. Bernstein, it feels like everybody is now in their own corner, watching and reading news that just mirrors their own political views. We’re all in our own bubbles. And we had President Trump calling the media the enemy of the people and saying everything was fake news. But at the same time, do you think the media has contributed to the state of the country, and what’s at stake for journalism?”
BERNSTEIN: “Well, the media is a very big term. It goes from Fox News, which is media and has very little interest in the best obtainable version of the truth, which really is what good reporting is. Bob Woodward and myself have been using that phrase for half a century. But you’ve touched on what really is a problem we don’t talk about enough. The people of this country on both sides of the debate, perhaps disproportionately, we’ll leave it to your viewers to decide which party or which point of view is disproportionate, are looking not for the best obtainable version of the truth, but for information, as you suggest, to buttress their already held political beliefs, prejudices, religious beliefs. Another difference than at the time of Watergate, we had a culture and a society in this country that by and large was willing to be open to different thoughts, opinions and decide issues in their minds on terms of what they really saw to be truthful. That’s a huge difference. We are now having a debate in this country in which the truth matters little to perhaps half the people in the country. We don’t know the measurement, but it’s huge. And the truth has been devalued, not just in media but throughout our culture. I mean, actually think about the whole concept of shame in our culture. There’s very little shame, particularly about lying, so we got to look at politics and media not just as isolated from the rest of the country or its people. It’s really a reflection, both media and politics, of the larger culture, and so I think we need to start covering not just politics, talking about the media, we need to be talking about the people of the country, covering the people of the country, particularly between the two coasts and what they’re saying, and why they’re saying it. It’s not just about covering the White House.”
HOSTIN: “Your new book, it’s fantastic, called Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom, gives us a glimpse of your early days in journalism, which began with your first job at just 16 years old. My question is, how did a 16-year-old kid end up working in a newsroom, and why did you think you could even do it?”
BERNSTEIN: “Well, I was really lucky. At the time when I was 16, I had one foot in the pool hall, one foot in a Juvenile court and maybe a little piece of one foot in the classroom. And my father could tell — my father could tell I was heading in the wrong direction. And he knew somebody at the Washington Star, the evening paper in Washington, I’m the second generation native of the city of Washington, the nation’s capital, and he knew someone at the paper. It was the town’s conservative paper, unlike the Washington Post, the town’s ‘liberal paper’ in its editorial policies. And also, the Star was a better paper than the Post in those days, and we took great delight in beating the Washington Post day after day. But I got an interview because of my father, with a production editor at the paper, and I had taken typing in tenth grade with the girls, rather than take more shop classes. I was sick of taking shop classes and making little trays with tooth pick holes in them that my mother had half a dozen of them in the kitchen. So I took typing. I took typing with the girls and I could type 90 words a minute. And when I got — when I got to the typing test part, finally, this production editor, first he had said look, boy, when you graduate high school, you come back here because I don’t think you’re ready to be a copy boy, the lowest level job in the paper yet. I was 5’3” and freckled, and I didn’t look like a senior. You saw the picture there. I didn’t look even like a senior in high school, but I came back to his office and I said Mr. Kaufman, I really want to work here. I really wanted to be — and I’d seen — he had taken me through the newsroom right after my interview. And it was the most stunning moment of my life, here with these typewriters [inaudible] and reporters, they’re all in copy, could feel the rumbles of the press. It was amazing.”
BEHAR: “It always sounds exciting when you talk about those early years. Anyway, I just want to thank you for coming on the show and congratulations on the new book which is called Chasing History.”
